Trevor is absolutely correct. Privacy rights are essential, even if some people may choose not to exercise them. Keep in mind that most of these services were developed primarily to further commercial purposes, not necessarily to make individuals' lives better. Many users may accept the trade-offs in using cross-site identity services (or may not be savvy enough to make a properly informed decision), but it is clearly a choice whether to use them or not. - LogEx from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Sarah, thank you for sharing with us. I completely agree to you. Online anonymity is passing. As I have argued in my model of Web evolution, the growth of the virtual individuals is an inevitable trend into the future of World Wide Web. I am glad to see more and more evidence to this claim. Yihong - Yihong Ding from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Very interesting stuff. I hadn't thought about it before, but this kinda ties into a piece I've been working on about ethics in social networking and marketing. - Justin Threlkeld from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Did everyone read to the end of the article?... "But for the convenience of a simple login, searchable personal data and web history, and social networks filled with friends, we'll have exchanged a bit of who we are in the process. We'll pay for our services on the new internet with our identity and personal information. When the companies we sold ourselves to use it for their own benefits, our outrage will come too late. We'll only have ourselves to blame." I don't think the point is that this is all good. - LogEx

Anonymity never even started on the Internet, it was an illusion caused by the obscuration of the outside world behind the monitor screen. What is very much alive is the concept of cloaking and alternative identities - aliases in fact, the amount of which very much depends on what your aims are. What is however important is that you cannot pretend to be someone else - you can only have an additional identity - it is still you. - Ian D. Nock from FriendFeed MT Plugin